Photo essay on the great depression

The church can engage with people in the most ancient and asked questions: what is life all about and what am I here for? I always say that the message (the gospel) never changes, but the methods by which we deliver them have to change. In a society where loneliness, depression and anxiety are ever-increasing epidemics, where bullying and suicide are regular occurrences in schools and plaguing the lives of young people, where social media is dictating worth and status, my hope is that churches can be an inclusive, welcoming, hopeful and helpful place for all people.

In
July, the Senate rejected the bonus 62 to 18. Most of the protesters went home, aided by
Hoover's offer of free passage on the rails. Ten thousand remained behind, among them a
hard core of Communists and other organizers. On the morning of July 28, forty protesters
tried to reclaim an evacuated building in downtown Washington scheduled for demolition.
The city's police chief, Pellham Glassford, sympathetic to the marchers, was knocked down
by a brick. Glassford's assistant suffered a fractured skull. When rushed by a crowd, two
other policemen opened fire. Two of the marchers were killed.
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Bud Fields and his family. Alabama. 1935 or 1936. Photographer: Walker
Evans.
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Squatter's Camp, Route 70, Arkansas, October, 1935.
Photographer: Ben Shahn
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Philipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935. Photographer:
Dorothea Lange.
In order to maximize their ability to exploit farm workers, California employers recruited
from China, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the American south, and Europe.
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Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936. Photographer: Walker Evans.
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Farmer and sons, dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936. Photographer:
Arthur Rothstein.
The drought that helped cripple agriculture in the Great Depression was the worst in the
climatological history of the country. By 1934 it had dessicated the Great Plains, from
North Dakota to Texas, from the Mississippi River Valley to the Rockies. Vast dust storms
swept the region.
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Migrant pea pickers camp in the rain. California, February, 1936.
Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
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In one of the largest pea camps in California. February, 1936.
Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
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The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one
of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in
Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor
around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave
this account of the experience:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by
a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do
remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from
the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she
was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the
surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from
her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around
her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a
sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography , Feb. 1960).
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